NewsHK
Mastercard is building infrastructure to let artificial intelligence agents make payments autonomously, with Coinbase and Ripple among the crypto firms enlisted to help.
The initiative marks one of the clearest moves yet by a traditional payments network to connect AI systems directly to financial rails — and to do it using crypto-linked infrastructure.
What "AI Agent Payments" Actually Means An AI agent, in this context, is software that acts on a user's behalf — browsing, booking, purchasing — without a human approving each individual transaction.
The missing piece has always been a payment method the agent can use independently.
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